


Snowbed

by ellorgast



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Nudity, Romance, Snowball Fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 22:01:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3184760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellorgast/pseuds/ellorgast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The hole in Cullen's ceiling becomes a problem when the snow starts falling, but Evelyn Trevelyan can take advantage of even the direst situation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snowbed

It came upon them late at night, when all save the most nocturnal of Skyhold slept. The silent intruder, gentle as a lover’s kiss, drifted easily through the gaps in their defenses. 

She woke to an icy caress on her cheek. Beneath the blankets and the heavy bear pelt that Cullen threw over his bed on the coldest winter nights, she felt snug and warm. Her bare limbs entangled with his, warmth against warmth inside their little cocoon. 

But a chill danced over her face. Icy pinpricks stung at her skin. Reluctantly, Evelyn blinked her eyes open, and squinted up at the source of her discomfort.

She had often felt that the holes in Cullen’s ceiling were beautiful, in their own way. In the day, the sunlight streamed through leaves of the tree branch that hung carelessly down into the room, and she felt as though they were in their own private garden. On clear nights, the stars glimmered overhead, and the moon cast a soft glow around them. 

Now the moon drifted hazily in and out of view, and by its faint light she could see fat white snowflakes tumbling through the largest gap in the ceiling. The hole was not precisely over their heads, but a gentle breeze gave the snowflakes just enough momentum to rush straight for the bed, as though it were the intended target. An even dusting of white flakes had settled all around them--on the covers and the pillows. The sparsely furnished loft, with its crookedly-placed bed and pile of splintered wood on the carpet, had been transformed into something ethereal. It was beautiful in a way, the soft white crystals that settled with a sort of hush, but when she turned her head, her pillow shifted and she got a face full of snow. 

Spluttering and well awake now, Evelyn turned to her commander and found him still burrowed up to his eyebrows beneath the covers. Snow dusted his curly hair, made it glisten slightly. She ducked beneath the covers herself and found his face, forehead all scrunched up as though he was worrying too much even in sleep. She often felt the urge to try to kiss those worry lines away, to smooth them out and watch them turn to laugh lines instead. 

She hesitated on the verge of doing that now. He needed his sleep, she knew. Some nights it seemed he never left that desk of his. He seemed to go through nearly as many candles as Josephine--no small feat--and rare were the mornings when he did not rise before her, when the sky was still dark and a pre-dawn hush lingered over Skyhold. 

She knew, though he had never said, that sleep was rarely a pleasure for him. That he stayed at his desk another hour, another ten minutes, another five minutes, to put off facing the nightmares that he always found in his loft. Maybe that was why his office was so well-kept and his loft still in shambles. Maybe that was why he still had holes in his ceiling.

She pressed her lips to the creases in his forehead. “Cullen, love, wake up.” He needed to see, she thought. He needed sleep, yes, but he also needed this moment of wonder in the middle of the night. Her commander slept on, however, not even his expression shifting beneath her touch.

He would thank her later, Evelyn decided. Or he would be angry, and she would have an excellent time making it up to him. Either way, the Inquisitor knew she would regret nothing when she scooped up a handful of snow, pulled back the covers, and dropped it on his neck.

Cullen shot upright with an incoherent yelp. All that Templar training must have been good for something, Evelyn supposed, as she failed to keep herself from laughing. He stared around himself in blank confusion, his bare torso just visible in the faint moonlight. Snow still clung to his hair, shimmering faintly, but the hair itself had turned to a lopsided mess of curls in the night. Her laughter took a moment to register, and when it did, he only looked more confused. “Maker, what is this?”

“Your new decor. What do you think?”

His hand went to his throat, where snowflakes still clung to yesterday’s stubble. “Did you--” his incredulous voice rose with each passing word, “did you hit me with snow?”

Evelyn gasped with exaggerated shock. “My love, I could never hit you! The snow, as you can see, is falling from the sky.”

“Oh, and I suppose you helped it with that.”

She pulled the covers up to her chin, partially to keep warm and partially to try to hide the grin on her face. “Are you suggesting that I can now control the weather? The Herald of Andraste, calling down snow from the heavens to smother her lover’s face?”

“You are enjoying yourself.”

“Why shouldn’t I? Have you seen your room? Have you seen your _hair_?”

Self-consciously, Cullen pushed his hand through his curls, causing a cascade of snow to fall over his shoulders. This development did not seem to please him nearly as much as it did her. “Skyhold’s going to be a mess in the morning. We’ll have to salt the steps, inspect the roofs for damages, clear the roads…”

“Stop. Stop thinking about tomorrow. Enjoy tonight. Isn’t this just a little bit magical?”

He looked at her, probably with as many shimmering snowflakes clinging to her hair as he had in his. The shaved side of her head tingled with cold. He smiled--that shy little smile that he sometimes got when he looked at her, the one that made his lips pull toward the scarred side. “I suppose. I would have thought that snow had lost all magic for you.”

She did not need to ask why. Too well she remembered the endless expanse of white stretching before her, the pain biting at her fingers and toes, the wind fighting her every step, the panicked voice in the back of her numb mind muttering that perhaps she was walking the wrong way, that she would never reach them before her strength gave out, that maybe there was no Inquisition left for her to reach at all.

Despite the blankets she was hunkered beneath, she shivered. “Maybe I just want to create better memories of it to replace the bad ones. Go back to seeing it as I did when I was a child.”

“Do you suppose you can do that?”

She looked up at him, sitting in the room that he put so little care into because he preferred not to think about it. “I think it’s worth trying.”

Cullen stared around the room again, taking in the flakes flying in through the cracks, the snow drift that was forming on the floor at the foot of his bed, the leaves of the branch overhead turning to thick globs of white. “Maker’s breath, we’re going to have to shovel out the training dummies in the morning if we have any hope of using them.”

“Not before we have to shovel ourselves out of this bed. How ever shall we clear a path to the ladder?”

“More to the point, where did you leave your clothes?”

Evelyn’s stomach sank. She glanced down at the floor, where a small heap was faintly visible beneath the otherwise pristine layer of white. “Uh…”

“They’re on the floor, aren’t they?”

“Before I answer that, I would point out that there is no other place that I could have left them.”

The smirk that Cullen gave her was unnervingly similar to the one he adopted when he was about to win at chess. “My dear Inquisitor, I believe you are without clothes.”

Evelyn squirmed. This was decidedly _not_ part of the plan. “As are you.”

“Ah, but you see I have a whole trunk full of perfectly dry clothing down in my office. _You_ have a somewhat longer trek to make for yours, I believe.”

She sat up, still holding the blankets bunched in front of her to cling to some kind of warmth. Her exposed back immediately tingled with chills, but she ignored it and fixed him with what she hoped were pleading eyes. “Unless, of course, you let me borrow some?”

“My clothes? I don’t believe they would fit you.”

“Would you have me walk all the way back to my own quarters stark naked in the middle of the night?”

“Now, nobody said you had to go _now_. You could wait until it’s light out.”

“Running naked across the grounds of Skyhold? That sounds familiar. Who do I know that has done that before?”

“Hmm, yes, I wonder.”

“Of course, if I must cross the yard naked, I won’t be running.”

“Oh, won’t you?”

She leaned into him, felt how chilled his skin felt from being in the winter air. It was automatic, the way he folded around her, drawing her into him. “Out in the pristine snow glistening all around in the moonlight? I would walk very, very…” she traced a hand up his neck, over his cheek, down to his scarred lip, “slowly.”

“That would be beautiful,” he muttered. “It’s too bad you so hate to be cold.”

“I could endure it.”

“Could you? In that case--” his hand snaked around her and slapped a handful of snow on the small of her back.

The screech that Evelyn emitted would have put a terror demon to shame. 

Tomorrow, she thought, she would look into getting his roof fixed. The room would surely be unusable until they could make it clean and dry, so they might as well fix it in the meantime. There would be roads to clear and steps to salt. Mundane decisions that she would have to weigh every bit as carefully as the life-threatening ones. And her elfroot. She’d have to rescue all the elfroot in the garden before it froze. But those were problems to deal with tomorrow. 

Tonight, they could afford to laugh instead. She could afford to tackle her lover to the floor and shove snow in his face. To let him pin her against the snow and kiss her all over while she screams with giggles at the alternating sensations of ice and heat. For him to find her frozen smallclothes and tease her with them. For her to shove _those_ in his face. They could afford a little magic.


End file.
